World Without End Read Free Page B

downtown Austin's sprawling University of Texas campus. Steve Conway was alone, the dream still clinging to him. He looked away from the window, went over to the coffeemaker, and poured himself another cup.
    Mounted on the opposite wall was a flat-screen TV hooked up to a desktop computer.
    Conway finished pouring his coffee and then drew the blinds. He picked up the remote from the long table, sat down, leaned back in the comfortable leather executive chair and hit the MENU button. Using the remote, he moved the arrow down until the word ROMU-LAN was highlighted and then hit the PLAY button.
    The TV screen came to life with the crisp, vivid picture of a man dressed head-to-toe in what looked like futuristic combat gear. The black, lightweight outfit and attached motorcycle-style helmet was, in reality, a working prototype of a high-tech military-combat suit being developed by the Army's Future Warrior combat system.
    The narrator began a Discovery Channel-type overview of the military suit. The two small boxes attached to the back of the utility belt contained a power supply fueled by liquid hydrogen, the other a climate-conditioning system that provided either warm or cool air to the soldier wearing the suit. The weapon's pod mounted on the soldier's wrist responded to voice commands, which, when activated, would fire either rounds of bullets or launch one of the four projectiles that could take down a car, even a helicopter. Mounted on the opposite wrist was a small, rectangular box containing a keypad and computer rolled into one unit, the heart and brain of the suit.
    On the screen the soldier ran across an open field. Out of nowhere came a pistol shot, its sound erupting over the conference room's ceiling-mounted speakers. Conway watched as the soldier collapsed to the ground.
    The soldier was not hurt; the suit's outer shell consisted of a layer of body armor. Microsensors attached to the soldier's skin relayed his life signs to the nearby base camp; orders were relayed back to him through the receiver placed inside the helmet. The enemy could not hear the encrypted voices speaking over the helmet.
    The soldier made a hand gesture to signal he was okay. No one was around to see it. The sensors placed inside the fingertips of his gloves relayed the gesture through microprocessors and then simultaneously transmitted the data back to base camp and across the visors of the other soldiers.
    The helmet itself was a technological marvel; it offered night vision, could pick up thermal heat signatures given off by any living creature, and allowed a soldier to zoom in on a target and then transmit the image and its coordinates to both base camp and onto the visors of other soldiers. The carbon nanotubes installed in the helmet's visor protected the soldier from an attack from a new and potentially lethal technology: blinding laser weapons.
    The next demonstration was the reason why Conway was in Austin.
    The soldier stood up. For the purposes of the video, the soldier typed the five-digit code into the keyboard instead of whispering the voice-activated command. When he was done, the soldier faced the camera.
    Conway leaned forward in his chair and stared at the screen. This was his favorite part.
    Blink and you' II miss it.
    The soldier waved to the camera… And then vanished.
    "Jesus," Conway mumbled under his breath. The transition was so fast, so fluid, that the first time he saw a demonstration, his mind couldn't process what had just happened had, in fact, refused to believe what it had just witnessed.
    This wasn't some Hollywood special effect. The technology used to make the soldier vanish was called optical camouflage. The wrist-mounted computer took pictures of the soldier's surroundings and using real-time pixel replication "painted" the images on the suit through thousands of fiber-optic cameras. Thanks to recent advances in computer microprocessors, the cloaking happened so fast, the transition so fluid, that it